


Drawing From Life

by kdm103020



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 3490
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:27:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22948552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kdm103020/pseuds/kdm103020
Summary: In which Steve cannot stop himself from drawing a certain someone.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Natasha Stark, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 7
Kudos: 116





	Drawing From Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ishipallthings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishipallthings/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Just Keep Your Eyes on Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19792393) by [ishipallthings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishipallthings/pseuds/ishipallthings). 



> So I drafted this thinking I would participate in Remix Madness, but I completely missed the claim date. Oh well. More cake for everyone!
> 
> Inspired by and dedicated to @ishipallthings, a great friend and writer.

It’s getting to be a problem.

At first it only happened when he was bored. Despite the rapid-fire pace of this century, unavoidable snippets of dead time still pepper the day, and this had always been his preferred way to pass the time. Paper is cheap, pencils are plentiful, and he’s never really liked to be still for too long. 

So eyes start to show up on the back of a gas receipt. Fingers in the corner of a napkin. Abstract swirls in a sketchbook that morph into familiar wisps of hair. Fragments of Natasha Stark spread over the surfaces of his life, drawn and traced and shaded onto anything that can bear a pigment. Tasha in the lab. Tasha in the suit. Tasha with horrendous bedhead, bleary-eyed over a cup of coffee. 

Then at some point his fingers had developed a mind of their own. One moment he’s going about his day, and the next thing he’s in the middle of a drawing he had no memory of beginning, and government documents that have no business being drawn on are graced with images of an all too familiar face. He and the paper shredder are very well acquainted at the moment.

He has it under control, though. So long as he’s able to keep his involuntary, idolatrous doodling away from his unconscious muse, everything should be fine. 

_Should_ being the operative word.

* * *

“Whatcha working on?” a voice calls from behind him, and the face partially etched on his page materializes in front of him. 

“Nothing!” he starts, drawing his sketchbook to his chest.

“You’re being awfully secretive about nothing.”

“It’s not —” he starts, trying and failing to produce an excuse. “It’s private.”

“Ooh, kinky. Care to share?”

“Tasha —”

“Say no more,” she answers, her hands raised in surrender. “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I’m just saying, sharing is caring, and I have less inhibitions than you might think.”

He waits until she leaves the room until to return to his page, because there’s know way she wouldn’t recognize the chipped nails and long fingers slowly working their way into existence. 

* * *

He blames the serum.

It’s all too easy to see her face when she’s not in the room, stamped in picture-perfect clarity on the back of his eyelids. His fingers can render the curve of her cheek and the ratios of her face with instinctual, mathematical precision. His drawings are correct if never satisfying. No matter how hard he tries, he can never quite capture the something that makes her _her_ , so he tries different angles, different expressions, different settings in an attempt to exorcise this urge to commit her to paper. If he can only get it right, do her justice, maybe he can reclaim the silence of his margins. 

But deep down, he knows it’s not the serum that’s placed her so vividly in his mind. He’s pretty sure that’s all down to her. 

* * *

“Steve, have you finished the write up for the Atlanta thing?”

The sound of her voice draws him upright, and it takes all of his training not to snap his file folder shut. “Working on it,” he answers, aiming for a casual tone.

“You know,” Tasha says, “these things would go so much faster if you filled them out digitally. Autocomplete is your friend.” 

“I’ll think about it,” he answers, desperate to draw her attention away from the forms in question.

“Suit yourself. I’m just saying — Wait, really? You’ll do it?” she asks, her voice rising in glee at her victory.

“Ehh,” he hedges.

“Baby, I’m so proud of you!” She throws her arms around his next, pressing a quick kiss to his lips. “Steve Rogers, welcome to the twenty-first century.”

“I haven’t said yes yet,” he answers.

“I’m hearing a solid _maybe_ ,” Tasha counters, and her eyes take on a mischievous glint. “And I’m a firm believer in encouraging good behavior,” she teases, and she brings her lips back to his, harder and with far greater intent.

It takes him a full minute to pull away. “This isn’t going to get that form finished any faster.”

“The report’s not my main priority at the moment,” Tasha answers, and this time he’s the one who leans in. Kissing her is always motive and reward enough, but if her eyes are on him then with any luck they won’t see a very familiar suit sketched in the margins of his report.

* * *

It goes on.

Each piece of paper that falls under is hand leaves it graced with some piece of her. It’s as if the universe has mandated some unholy equation in which Steve plus paper plus writing utensil will inevitably result in some multiple of Natasha Stark. The constancy would be reassuring if the staple wasn’t so voyeuristic, and Steve has a sinking feeling that it’s only a matter of time until his disturbing lack of control is exposed to his unwitting muse.

His luck runs out in September. Things are calm, for once, and they’re both spending a rainy Saturday holed up in the lab. Steve has theoretically been working on a budget proposal, which means he’s spent about thirty minutes on his project and a cumulative eight hours doing anything else. Tasha, on the other hand, has spent the day enmeshed in a new project that apparently necessitates six computer monitors, three whiteboards, Pink Floyd’s entire discography, and a frankly unhealthy amount of coffee. 

The coffee proves his downfall. Lance, in his typical bumbling robot fashion, attempts to place a screwdriver on the lab bench, and instead the contents of Tasha’s latest mug cascading across the table. The two of them jump to their feet. 

“Shit! Grab the phones!” Tasha yells, swiping objects on the table out of the path of destruction. She gathers a bundle of papers into her lap before turning to her errant bot. “Lance, I swear, you are _this close_ to broken down and refashioned into a toaster oven.”

The robot gives a series of despondent beeps and whistles that Steve swears he’s starting to understand. He dabs coffee off his screen with the back of his sleeve and drags his fingers over the damp surface. “Phones still work.”

“I designed them to be waterproof, so they’d better still work,” Tasha mutters as if daring her tech to malfunction. “I think we got everything in time,” she says, looking down at the items she’s saved. “We can probably press these pages flat,” she says, he fingers fanning out a notebook that Steve recognizes far too late. 

“Tasha — ” he starts desperately. 

“The ink doesn’t look like it’s smeared, so I think it’s going to be salvageable…” her voice trails off as she finally takes stock of what she’s holding.

The silence draws out to a frankly uncomfortable level, and Steve spends every interminable second waiting for the hammer to fall. His notebook is upside down, but it’s easy enough to recreate the images that Tasha must be seeing. Some of them are abstract enough for plausible deniability, but others… Well, who else has an arc reactor nestled beneath their breastbone?

Tasha flips through the pages with an untypical silence. Steve ticks off each flip of a page in his head, knowing that each successive turn provides more evidence of his borderline stalkerish hobby. He’s almost to twenty when Tasha finally speaks.

“So you actually can draw?” Tasha asks.

“What?” 

“The night we met,” she answers, “and you claimed to be a graphic artist?”

It takes him a moment to lay aside his panic and place the memory, but a few seconds are enough to bring the appropriate images to his mind. He remembers the cover story, the not-quite lie he’d fed to the girl he’d danced with, and remembers how hard he wanted to commit her face to memory in case he never got the chance to see her again. Fate had a funny way of working things out, at least in that scenario, but if Tasha were to look closer at that sketchbook, he knows she’d find at least a few images of ‘Evelyn’ tucked inside the pages.

“I told you I could,” he answers at last. 

“You told me you sketched.” 

“These _are_ sketches.”

“They’re _beautiful_ ,” she counters.

He wants to deny it, but considering they’re all of her, there’s no way he can without it sounding like an insult. So he hedges. “I had good base material.”

She snorts. “That’s one I haven’t been called before. You say the sweetest things, Blue Eyes.”

“You’re not mad?” he asks, the first glimmer of hope that she doesn’t find his habit disturbingly invasive. 

“Why would I be mad?” 

“I didn’t ask.”

She snorts. “I’m flattered. If anything, you’ve made me look too good.”

“Not possible.” The answer is instantaneous.

“You’re a shameless liar, Steve Rogers.”

“But you don’t mind?” he presses. “You swear?”

“Every goddamn day,” Tasha pushes back, and while he appreciates the levity, it’s still not enough to set him at ease, which she must see because she goes on. “It’s fine, Steve. Sweet, really. Consider this carte blanche permission to go wild.”

It’s a blessing, and one that he didn’t think he’d ever be given. To look, to see. His habit’s been bad enough in secret. What might it be once permitted? “That could be dangerous.”

“I like dangerous. Besides,” she says, inching closer and curling her palm against his chest, “if I wanted safe, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you.”

Steve wishes he could reciprocate, but he can’t. It would imply that his decision to love her had been a choice.

And it never has been. 

* * *

Nothing comes of their conversation until nearly a week later, when Steve walks into the living room and finds an exhausted looking Natasha sprawled on the couch. 

“Tough day?” he asks.

She groans. “Bureaucracy’s a bitch, Steve. If I never have to meet another congressional liaison, it will be too soon.”

“Mmm,” he intones sympathetically. Better her than him.

As if she’s heard his internal monologue, she cocks and eyebrow and leers. “If you really loved me, you’d take the next one.”

“You know,” he answers with his own grin, “I have a feeling I’m going to be busy for the foreseeable future."

“Coward. See if I give you any more upgrades.”

“You actually think you’d be able to stop upgrading my suit?” 

Her nose crinkles in a sneer that he’s committed to paper dozens of times. “I hate you.”

“I’m right.”

“I hate that you’re right.”

He sits on the couch beside her, drawing one of her feet into his lap. “It has to happen occasionally.” As he presses his thumbs into the balls of her feet, she lets out a sinful moan.

“Keep doing that and I’ll forgive you anything.”

Despite preexisting evidence to the contrary, Steve can occasionally follow orders when it suits him. He digs the heel of his hand into her arches, and keeps applying a firm pressure until some of the tension leaves her face settles out into a more peaceful expression. His eyes trace her face, the way the curve of her lashes brush against her cheek, and his fingers twitch involuntarily against her foot. His eyes dart to the sketchpad on the side table and he begins to calculate his odds of grabbing his pencil without her noticing, when he realizes that the subterfuge is unnecessary. He’s allowed to just...ask. 

He twists his body more than necessary as he grabs his supplies, causing her to look up. He cranks his neck toward the pad. “Can I?”

“Really?” she asks, cocking an eyebrow. “I’m a mess!”

“You said carte blanche,” he counters, but tries to keep his voice as neutral as possible in case she really wants to be left in peace. 

It takes a moment, but she finally retorts with a beleaguered sigh. “ _Fiiiine_. Immortalize my flop sweat in charcoal.”

Steve smooths out his page, and then gazes up at her through his lashes. He gives her a clinical once over and starts strategizing. 

“Can you bend your leg?” 

“Captain Rogers!” she teases, faux-scandalized. 

Steve knows better than to take that bait. “No, like —” he crooks her leg up, arranging her into the sprawl that he knows she defaults to when she’s the most relaxed. To complete the image, he grabs one of the throw pillows and places it on her torso, where her arms instinctually wrap around it. 

“Perfect,” he says, taking in her lines. “Think you can hold that?”

“If I don’t fall asleep first,” she answers, wiggling deeper into the couch cushions. “Gotta say, babe, this is one of my more comfortable modeling sessions.”

Having seen some of her previous photoshoots, Steve knows the truth of her statement. Tasha’s lived the vast majority of her life in the public eye, and twenty plus years of publicity jaunts and have seen her bent every which way in every conceivable style of clothing. This, though, is a look that would never make a magazine cover. She has grease on her fingers, thick-rimmed glasses denting in her nose, and he’s pretty sure she those pajama pants are rocking on their fourth day, but there’s an ease to her here that he’s never seen replicated in publicized pictures. He’s not sure if he’ll be able to capture it, but he’s sure as hell going to try. 

He glances back up at Tasha, who, as promised, has managed to retain her quasi-artistic sprawl. 

“Now look at me,” he says. 

Tasha’s lips quirk Steve, and she meets his eyes with a mocking gaze, as if daring him to capture her look. Yet just when he’s finally secured permission, he can’t bring himself to start drawing. It’d mean looking away from her.

The archness slowly starts to fade from her eyes and settles into something infinitely more tender.

“Steve —”

“Just,” he interrupts, not quite ready to put anything else into words. “Just keep looking at me.”

“I’m always looking at you,” she answers, layers folded into her words.

Steve bends down to his page, knowing he’ll never be able to say what he wants to if he’s meeting her eyes. “I like it. When you look. When you _see_ me.” 

“I like seeing you,” she answers, her voice uncharacteristically soft, and Steve knows that she knows. He feels his face warm as he reapplies himself to his task. 

It’s a testament to their ease with each other than the room drifts into relative silence. His pencil scratches softly against the page, and her breath acts as an understated metronome, keeping track of time time when the two of them no longer care to. He starts slowly, faintly etching shapes onto paper, but his strokes become bolder as he gains confidence. His movements are half muscle memory, half inspired by the luxury of drawing from life. 

He finally straightens after an indiscernible amount of time. He flexes his fingers in and out, attempting to loosen the muscles in his hand, as he turns a critical eye to his work.

“Do you have enough?” she asks from the other end of the couch, still not moving as she waits for his answer.

He glances down at the image he’s managed to create. It’s good; as judgmental as he is of himself, he can at least admit that, but he’s fairly certain the fondness he feels for the image has more to do with his subject than his skill. But he can tear apart his work later. Why obsess over a copy when he has the original in front of him?

“Never,” he answers. 

She smiles back, and Steve stares at the curve of her mouth, knowing that he has yet another scene he needs to commit to paper. “Do you have what you need?” she offers instead.

He closes his sketchpad and draws closer to her. 

“Always.”

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments feed the beast. I treasure each and every one!
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://kdm103020.tumblr.com/). You could also consider reblogging [this](https://kdm103020.tumblr.com/post/611297555344670720/drawing-from-life-kdm103020-marvel-3490) story post. 


End file.
